NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES

THE FADING AMERICAN DREAM:

TRENDS IN ABSOLUTE INCOME MOBILITY SINCE 1940

Raj Chetty
David Grusky
Maximilian Hell
Nathaniel Hendren
Robert Manduca
Jimmy Narang

Working Paper 22910

http://www.nber.org/papers/w22910

NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
December 2016

We thank Rebecca Diamond, Guido Imbens, Xavier Jaravel, Sean Reardon, and numerous
seminar participants for helpful comments, Robert Fluegge and our other pre-doctoral fellows for
outstanding research assistance, and David Leonhardt for posing the question that led to this
research. This paper incorporates results from an independent working paper by Robert Manduca
entitled Opportunity No More: Declining Absolute Mobility in the United States, 1940-2010.
This research was funded by Stanford University, Harvard University, the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The views expressed herein are those of
the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic
Research.

NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been
peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies
official NBER publications.

2016 by Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca,
and Jimmy Narang. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may
be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including notice, is given to the
source.
The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940
Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, and Jimmy
Narang
NBER Working Paper No. 22910
December 2016
JEL No. H0,J0

ABSTRACT

We estimate rates of absolute income mobility the fraction of children who earn more than
their parents by combining historical data from Census and CPS cross-sections with panel data
for recent birth cohorts from de-identified tax records. Our approach overcomes the key data
limitation that has hampered research on trends in intergenerational mobility: the lack of large
panel datasets linking parents and children. We find that rates of absolute mobility have fallen
from approximately 90%for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. The
result that absolute mobility has fallen sharply over the past half century is robust to the choice of
price deflator, the definition of income, and accounting for taxes and transfers. In counterfactual
simulations, we find that increasing GDP growth rates alone cannot restore absolute mobility to
the rates experienced by children born in the 1940s. In contrast, changing the distribution of
growth across income groups to the more equal distribution experienced by the 1940 birth cohort
would reverse more than 70% of the decline in mobility. These results imply that reviving the
American Dream of high rates of absolute mobility would require economic growth that is
spread more broadly across the income distribution.

Raj Chetty Nathaniel Hendren

Department of Economics Harvard University
Stanford University Department of Economics
579 Serra Mall Littauer Center Room 235
Stanford, CA 94305 Cambridge, MA 02138
and NBER and NBER
chetty@stanford.edu nhendren@gmail.com

David Grusky Robert Manduca

Stanford Center on Poverty & Inequality Harvard University
Stanford University 79 JFK Street
450 Serra Mall, Building 80 Cambridge, MA 02138
Stanford, CA 94305-7208 rmanduca@g.harvard.edu
grusky@stanford.edu
Jimmy Narang
Maximilian Hell UC-Berkeley, Dept. of Economics
Stanford Center on Poverty & Inequality 579 Evans Hall
Stanford University Berkeley, CA 94709
450 Serra Mall, Building 80 jimmy.narang@gmail.com
Stanford, CA 94305-7208
hell@stanford.edu
One of the defining features of the American Dream is the ideal that children have a higher
standard of living than their parents (Samuel 2012). When children are asked to assess their
economic progress, they frequently compare their own standard of living to that of their parents
(Goldthorpe 1987, Hoschschild 2016). Such measures of absolute income mobility the fraction of
children earning or consuming more than their parents are also often the focus of policy makers
when judging the degree of economic opportunity in the U.S. (e.g., Obama 2013).1
In this paper, we assess whether the U.S. is living up to this ideal by studying two questions.
First, what fraction of children earn more than their parents today? Second, how have rates of
absolute mobility changed over time? Despite longstanding interest in these questions, evidence on
absolute income mobility remains scarce (Halikias and Reeves 2016), largely because of the lack of
large, high-quality panel datasets linking children to their parents in the U.S.2
We overcome this data problem by developing a new method of estimating rates of absolute
mobility that can be implemented using existing datasets covering the 1940-84 birth cohorts. Our
approach combines two inputs: marginal income distributions for parents and children and the
copula of the parent and child income distribution, defined as the joint distribution of parent and
child income ranks.
We estimate marginal income distributions for parents and children of the 1940-1984 birth
cohorts using cross-sectional data from the decennial Census and Current Population Surveys (CPS).
In our baseline analysis, we measure income in pre-tax dollars at the household level when parents
and children are approximately thirty years old, adjusting for inflation using the CPI-U-RS. We then
show the robustness of our results to a variety of specification choices, such as using alternative
inflation adjustments, adjusting for taxes and transfers, and measuring income at later ages.
We estimate the fraction of children who earn more than their parents in each birth cohort by
combining the marginal income distributions with the copula in each cohort. For recent birth cohorts,
we follow Chetty et al. (2014a) and directly estimate the joint distribution of parent and child ranks
using information from de-identified federal income tax returns covering the U.S. population. For
earlier birth cohorts, such population-level panel data are not available. We instead proceed in two
1
In a 2013 speech on economic mobility, President Obama noted that peoples frustrations are partly rooted in
the fear that their kids wont be better off than they were.
2
Prior research has studied the level of absolute income mobility for recent cohorts in the U.S. using panel surveys
such as the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (e.g., Isaacs, Sawhill, and Haskins 2008, Lopoo and DeLeire 2012;
Bengali and Daly 2013; Acs, Elliott, and Kalish 2016). These studies yield conflicting results because estimates of
absolute mobility using available panel income datasets are sensitive to econometric assumptions and sample
specification (Halikias and Reeves 2016). To the best of our knowledge, there is no evidence on trends in absolute
income mobility, although prior studies have documented declining absolute mobility in terms of occupational status
(Hauser et al. 2000) and educational attainment (Hout and Janus 2011).

1
steps. First, we report estimates of absolute mobility under the assumption that the copula remained
stable across all birth cohorts, a benchmark motivated by evidence of copula stability since the 1970s
(Chetty et al. 2014b).3 Because we have no evidence that the copula was in fact stable prior to 1970,
we then construct upper and lower bounds on absolute mobility for each birth cohort by searching
over all plausible copulas using linear programming methods.4 The key technical result of the paper
is that these bounds are very tight for the 1940-1950 birth cohorts, allowing us to obtain a reliable
time series on rates of absolute mobility despite the lack of historical panel data.
Using this methodology, we find that rates of absolute upward income mobility in the United
States have fallen sharply since 1940. Under the benchmark of copula stability, the fraction of
children earning more than their parents fell from 92% in the 1940 birth cohort to 50% in the 1984
birth cohort. Rates of absolute mobility fell the most for children with parents in the middle class.
Relaxing the copula stability assumption for earlier cohorts, we find that the rate of absolute
mobility for the 1940 birth cohort is bounded between 84% and 98% across all plausible copulas,
well above the rates observed for recent cohorts. Absolute mobility is not very sensitive to the copula
for the 1940 birth cohort because income grew very rapidly at all quantiles of the distribution
between 1940 and 1970. As a result, nearly all children earned more than the highest-income earners
in their parents generation, implying rates of absolute mobility near 100% regardless of which
children were linked to which parents.
In more recent cohorts, the copula i.e., which parents are linked to which children matters
much more because there has been little income growth across most of the distribution since 1980.
For the 1984 cohort, the bounds on absolute mobility under alternative copulas span 14% to 88%.
Fortunately, the copula is directly observed for these cohorts in tax records. In short, the key piece of
missing data that has hampered direct measurement of absolute mobility the lack of historical panel
data linking parents and children turns out to be inessential for characterizing trends in mobility.
The marked decline in absolute mobility since 1940 is robust to a range of alternative
specifications. Most importantly, the qualitative results do not change when we account for potential
changes in the quality of goods and new product innovation, which could have important effects on
real income. Prior work on bias due to new products in inflation indices suggests that the annual

3
Copula stability implies that relative mobility the correlation between childrens earnings and their parents
earnings has not changed over time. Several studies have documented that relative mobility has not changed
significantly in recent decades using both transition matrices (copulas) and other statistics such as intergenerational
elasticities of income and rank-rank correlations (e.g., Lee and Solon 2009, Hauser 2010, Chetty et al. 2014b).
4
We define the set of plausible copulas as copulas under which the distribution of childrens incomes is weakly
increasing with their parents incomes (in the sense of first-order stochastic dominance). This restriction rules out
perverse copulas that generate negative intergenerational income persistence.

2
inflation rate measured by the CPI-U-RS may be biased upward by 0.8% (Meyer and Sullivan 2009,
Broda and Weinstein 2010). Subtracting 0.8% from the inflation rate each year, we find that absolute
mobility declined from 93% to 59% between the 1940 and 1984 cohorts. We also obtain similar
results when we (a) use post-tax and post-transfer measures of income instead of pre-tax measures,
(b) calculate childrens incomes at age 40 (for the 1940-74 birth cohorts) instead of age 30, and (c)
adjust for changes in family size over time. Other metrics for upward mobility, such as the ratio of
childrens income to their parents incomes, also exhibit similar declines.
We find robust evidence of declines in absolute mobility across subgroups. Absolute mobility
fell in all 50 states between the 1940 and 1980 cohorts, although the rate of decline varied, with the
largest declines concentrated in states in the industrial Midwest states such as Michigan and Illinois.
We also find substantial declines in absolute mobility for both sons and daughters when income is
measured at the household level. The decline in absolute mobility is especially steep from 95% in
the 1940 cohort to 41% in the 1984 cohort when we compare the individual earnings of sons to
their fathers.
Why have rates of upward income mobility fallen so sharply over the past half century?
There have been two important macroeconomic trends that have affected the incomes of children
born in the 1980s relative to those born in the 1940s: lower Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth
rates and greater inequality in the distribution of growth (Goldin and Katz 2008). We consider two
counterfactual scenarios to assess the relative contribution of these two factors.
First, we consider a higher GDP growth scenario, in which children in the 1980 cohort
experience GDP growth from birth to age 30 that is comparable to what was experienced by the 1940
cohort, but GDP is distributed in proportion to GDP shares by income percentile in 2010. This
counterfactual expands the size of the economic pie, dividing it in the proportions by which it is
divided today. In this scenario, absolute mobility rises to 62%, closing 29% of the gap in absolute
mobility between the 1940 and 1980 birth cohorts. Thus, the slowdown in aggregate economic
growth in recent decades, although important, does not explain most of the observed decline in
absolute mobility.
Second, we consider a more broadly shared growth scenario, in which the actual GDP in
2010 is allocated across income percentiles as it was in the 1940 cohort. This counterfactual keeps
the size of the economic pie fixed at its observed level, but divides it more evenly, as in the past. In
this scenario, the rate of absolute mobility rises to 80%, closing 71% of the gap in absolute mobility
between the 1940 and 1980 cohorts.

3
 Together, these counterfactual simulations show that increasing GDP growth without
changing the current distribution of growth would have modest effects on rates of absolute mobility.
Under the current distribution of GDP, we would need real GDP growth rates above 6% per year to
return to the rates of absolute mobility seen in the 1940s. Intuitively, because a large fraction of
GDP goes to a small number of high income earners today, higher GDP growth does not
substantially increase the number of children who earn more than their parents. Of course, this does
not mean that GDP growth does not matter: changing the distribution of growth naturally has smaller
effects on absolute mobility when there is very little growth to be distributed.5 The key point is that
reviving the American Dream of high rates of absolute mobility would require more broadly
shared economic growth rather than just higher GDP growth rates.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section I summarizes our methodology
and data sources. Section II provides baseline estimates under the benchmark assumption of a stable
copula. Section III establishes the key result that estimates of absolute mobility for early cohorts are
insensitive to the copula. Section IV assesses the sensitivity of the results to alternative price
deflators and other specification choices, and presents results on heterogeneity by gender and state.
Section V presents the counterfactuals, and Section VI concludes. Details on the methods and
supplementary results are presented in the Supplementary Appendix. Code to replicate the results and
statistics on absolute mobility by birth cohort, parent percentile, state, and gender can be downloaded
from www.equality-of-opportunity.org.

I. Methods and Data

Let denote the income of child i in birth cohort c and let denote the income of his/her
parents. In our baseline analysis, we measure income as pre-tax family income (summing income
across spouses) at age 30. We measure incomes in 2014 dollars, adjusting for inflation using the CPI-
U-RS (research series).6 In sensitivity analyses, discussed in Section IV, we consider several variants
of this income concept: using alternative price deflators, measuring income at age 40, measuring
income after taxes and transfers, and adjusting for family size.
We define the rate of absolute mobility in cohort c, , as the fraction of children in cohort c
that earn more than their parents:

5
Moreover, policies that promote higher GDP growth could also lead to more broadly distributed growth.
6
The CPI-U-RS is available from 1977 onward. Prior to 1977, we use the CPI-U multiplied by the ratio of the CPI-
U-RS to the CPI-U in 1977 to rescale the CPI-U in previous years.

4
 1
= 1{ }, (1)

where is the number of children in the cohort.

We estimate by decomposing the joint distribution of parent and child income into the
marginal distributions of parent and child income and the joint distribution of the ranks (the copula).
Let denote the percentile rank of child i in the income distribution for children in birth cohort c.

Similarly, let denote the percentile rank of child is parent in the income distribution of parents
who have children in cohort c. The joint distribution of parent and child ranks for cohort c is given by
( , ), the probability density function (pdf) of observing a child with income rank and

parental income rank . Let () and () denote the rth quantile of the child and parent income

distributions (measured in dollars), respectively. () and () summarize the marginal
distributions of parent and child incomes. With this notation, we can write absolute mobility as:

= 1{ ( ) ( )} ( , ) (2)

Intuitively, a child with rank earns more than her parent with rank if the -th quantile of the
childs income distribution is higher than the -th quantile of the parents income distribution, i.e.

( ) ( ). The copula, ( , ), measures the probability that each pair of ranks ( , )

occurs. Absolute mobility is the fraction of cases where ( ) ( ), integrating over the
copula.
Equation (2) shows that absolute mobility can be calculated by estimating (a) the marginal
income distribution for children (which yields ), (b) the marginal income distributions for parents

(which yields ), and (c) the copula, ( , ). The rest of this section summarizes how we
estimate these three distributions; a detailed description is provided in the Supplementary Appendix.

Childrens Marginal Income Distributions. We obtain marginal income distributions at age 30 for
children in the 1940-1984 birth cohorts directly from the 1970-2014 March Current Population
Surveys (CPS). The sample of children includes U.S.-born members of the 1940-84 birth cohorts
who, at age 30, were present in the U.S. and not institutionalized. We exclude immigrants in order to
have a consistent sample in which we observe both parents and childrens incomes.7 We compute
family income as the sum of spouses personal pre-tax income.

7
The CPS does not ask for respondents birthplace prior to 1994; hence, for children born before 1964, we cannot
exclude immigrants from the sample. Most of the growth in the foreign-born share of the population occurred in
recent decades, limiting the bias created by the inclusion of immigrants in early cohorts (National Academy of

5
Parents Marginal Income Distributions. Estimating the income distributions of parents at age 30
who have children in a given birth cohort is more complicated because of the lack of historical panel
data. We construct parents income distributions for children in each of the 1940-84 birth cohorts by
pooling data from Census cross-sections between 1940 and 2000 (using the 1 percent IPUMS
samples). In order to cover all parents using decennial Censuses, we estimate parents incomes when
the highest earner is between the ages of 25 and 35, a symmetric window around age 30.8
For example, we estimate the income distribution of parents of children in the 1970 birth
cohort as follows. First, we use the 1970 Census and select parents between the ages of 25 and 35
who have a child less than one year old in 1970. Next, we turn to the 1980 Census and select parents
between the ages of 26 and 35 who have ten year old children (i.e., individuals who had a child in
1970 when they were between the ages of 16 and 25).9 Third, to identify parents between ages 35 and
45 who had children less than one year old in 1970, we turn to the 1960 Census and select all
individuals aged 25-35. We give this group a weight equal to the fraction of individuals in the 1970
Census between the ages of 35 and 45 who have a child less than one year old in 1970. This
approach assumes that the income distribution of those who have children after age 35 is
representative of the income distribution of the general population. Such an assumption is
unavoidable as one cannot identify parents who will have children in the future in cross-sectional
data. Fortunately, this assumption turns out to be inconsequential in practice because most children
are born before their parents are 35.10
We estimate income distributions for parents with children in each of the other birth cohorts
from 1940-1984 using an analogous approach. Summary statistics on parents and childrens incomes
by birth cohort are reported in Table S1.

Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2015). Moreover, because immigrants earnings are lower than natives
earnings on average, this bias likely reduces our estimates of absolute mobility in the early cohorts, rendering our
estimate of the amount of decline more conservative than the true decline for natives.
8
The measures of total pre-tax income available in the Census change over time. From 1970 onward, we use the
sum of spouses personal pre-tax income minus income from public assistance. In 1960, we use the sum of spouses
personal pre-tax income. In 1950, we use total family income. In 1940, only income from wages and salaries is
available, along with an indicator for non-wage, non-salary income, which we use to impute non-wage income. See
the Supplementary Appendix for further details.
9
For simplicity, we restrict attention to individuals who have children between the ages of 16 and 45 throughout our
analysis.
10
In the Supplementary Appendix, we show that restricting attention to parents who have children between the ages
of 25 and 35 thereby avoiding this assumption entirely yields very similar results.

6
Copula. For children born in the 1980s, we estimate a non-parametric copula a 100 x 100 matrix
giving the probability of each child and parent rank pair ( , ) exactly as in Chetty et al. (2014a,
Online Data Table 1). The sample includes all children born between 1980 and 1982 who are linked
to parents based on dependent claiming on tax forms.11
For both parents and children, we define family income in the tax records in a manner that is
as similar to the measures in the CPS and Census as possible. For those who file tax returns, we
define income as aggregate gross income (AGI) plus the non-taxable portion of Social Security and
Disability Income. For non-filers, we measure income using third-party information returns, defining
income as the sum of the W-2 wage earnings, Social Security and Disability Income, and
Unemployment Insurance income.12 If individuals do not file a tax return and have no information
returns filed on their behalf, taxable income is coded as 0.13
Following Chetty et al. (2014a), we measure childrens incomes as mean income in 2011 and
2012, when children in the 1980-82 birth cohorts are between the ages of 30 and 32. We measure
parents incomes as mean taxable income between 1996 and 2000, the first five years in which
population tax records are available.14 Parents are between the ages of 30 and 60 when we measure
their incomes because we limit the sample to parents who have children between the ages of 15 and
40 in 1980-82. Chetty et al. (2014a) show that the distribution of income ranks is stable between the
ages of 30 and 60. Because of this rank stability, this approach provides an accurate estimate of the
copula that one would obtain if one could observe income ranks at age 30 for all parents.
We exclude parents with zero or negative income when constructing the copula because
parents with no earnings typically do not file a tax return and hence cannot be linked to their children
based on dependent claiming. This does not pose a problem for measuring absolute mobility because
children whose parents have zero income always earn at least as much as their parents. We calculate
the fraction of parents with zero income in each cohort based on Census data and include these

11
This definition of parents based on who claims a child as a dependent differs from the biological definition
of parents used in the CPS and Census. Using birth certificate data to link parents to children yields very similar
estimates of the copula (not reported). The population in the tax data also differs slightly from that in the CPS and
Census because it includes institutionalized individuals.
12
For non-filers, we cannot include the spouses income. However, the vast majority of non-filers of working age
are single (Cilke 1998).
13
Importantly, these observations are true zeros rather than missing data. Because the dataset includes all tax
records, we know that these individuals have 0 taxable income.
14
Chetty et al. (2014a) use multi-year averages of income to mitigate the influence of transitory income fluctuations;
however, they show (Chetty et al., Appendix Figure IID) that using annual income measures yields very similar
estimates of rank distributions because the degree of transitory variance in income ranks is small in tax records.

7
individuals when computing average rates of absolute mobility, assigning the group of children
whose parents have zero income an absolute mobility rate of 100%.
We define childrens percentile ranks based on their incomes relative to other children in
their birth cohort. We include children with 0 income when constructing these ranks, breaking ties at
the mean.15 Likewise, parents are assigned percentile ranks based on their incomes relative to other
parents (among those with positive income). The copula is then estimated as a 100100 matrix that
gives the joint probability of each child and parent rank pair ( , ).
For children born before 1980, we lack the panel data necessary to estimate the copula.
Chetty et al. (2014b) use a 0.1% IRS Statistics of Income panel to show that the copula (relative
mobility, measured by percentile ranks) is approximately stable from the 1971 birth cohort to the
1984 birth cohort.16 Motivated by this result, we begin by assuming copula stability across all cohorts
since 1940, applying the copula estimated for the 1980-82 cohorts to all cohorts. We then compute
bounds on absolute mobility searching over alternative copulas, as there is no empirical evidence that
copula stability holds going back to 1940.

II. Baseline Estimates

This section presents our baseline estimates of absolute mobility, which assume copula
stability from 1940-84 and measure family income in real pre-tax dollars at age 30. Figure 1A plots
rates of absolute mobility by parental income percentile for the decadal birth cohorts, 1940-1980.
Each series shows the percentage of children earning more than their parents vs. their parents
income percentile, limiting the sample to parents with positive income.
In the 1940 birth cohort, nearly all children grew up to earn more than their parents
regardless of their parental income. Naturally, rates of absolute mobility were lower at the highest
parental income levels, as children have less scope to do better than their parents if their parents had
very high incomes.
Rates of absolute mobility have fallen substantially since 1940, especially for families in the
middle and upper class. At the 10th percentile of the parental income distribution, children born in
1940 had a 94% chance of earning more than their parents, compared with 70% for children born in

15
For example, if 10% of a birth cohort has 0 income, all children with 0 income receive a percentile rank of 5.
16
The 0.1% sample used by Chetty et al. (2014b) is adequate to assess the stability of the copula using statistics such
as rank-rank correlations and quintile probabilities, but it is not sufficiently large to directly estimate the 100 x 100
percentile copula for each birth cohort from 1971-84. This is why we use the 1980 copula estimated from the
population tax data for all cohorts.

8
1980. At the 50th percentile, rates of absolute mobility fell from 93% for children born in 1940 to
45% for those born in 1980. And at the 90th percentile, rates of absolute mobility fell from 88% to
33% over the same period.
Figure 1B aggregates the rates of absolute mobility across parental incomes (including those
with zero income) and plots average absolute mobility ( ) for each birth cohort from 1940-1984.
Absolute mobility declined starkly across birth cohorts: on average, 92% of children born in 1940
grew up to earn more than their parents. In contrast, only 50% of children born in 1984 grew up to
earn more than their parents. The downward trend in absolute mobility was especially sharp between
the 1940 and 1964 cohorts. The decline paused for children born in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
whose incomes at age 30 are measured in the midst of the economic boom of the late 1990s.
Absolute mobility then continued to fall steadily in the remaining birth cohorts.

III. Bounds Under Alternative Copulas

We now assess the sensitivity of the estimates reported in Figure 1 to the assumption that the
copula remained stable at the values observed for the 1980 birth cohort going back to 1940. We do so
by deriving bounds on the rate of absolute mobility in each birth cohort, searching over all copulas
( , ), defined non-parametrically by a 100 x 100 percentile-level matrix.
We restrict attention to copulas satisfying the intuitive requirement that children from higher
income families are less likely to have lower incomes. Formally, we assume that the income
distribution of children with higher-income parents first-order stochastically dominates (FOSD) the
income distribution of children from lower income families:

0 (, ) is weakly decreasing in for all (3)

For each birth cohort, we calculate bounds on absolute mobility by solving for the copulas
( , ) that minimize and maximize , as defined in equation (2), given the empirically

observed marginal distributions, ( ) and ( ). We impose two sets of constraints on this
problem: the FOSD requirements for each ( , ) pair in (3) and integration constraints requiring
that the columns and rows of ( , ) sum to 1. This optimization problem has 100 x 100 = 10,000
arguments, which might appear to be computationally intractable. Fortunately, since the objective
function in (2) and all the constraints are linear, this problem can be solved rapidly using a standard
linear programming algorithm.

9
 The results of this bounding exercise are presented in Figure 2A. The series in circles
reproduces the baseline estimates under the assumption of copula stability shown in Figure 1B. The
dashed lines show the upper and lower bounds on absolute mobility. The bounds are very tight in
early cohorts but grow much wider for more recent cohorts. For example, for the 1940 birth cohort,
the bounds on absolute mobility span only 84% to 98%. In contrast, for the 1984 birth cohort, the
bounds span 14% to 88%.
The dashed vertical line in Figure 2A demarcates the point after which the copula is known to
be stable based on the analysis of tax records in Chetty et al. (2014b). Quite conveniently, the panel
data necessary to estimate the copula happen to be available for precisely the cohorts where the
bounds are least informative. For earlier cohorts, where the data needed to estimate the copula are
missing, the bounds are quite narrow and the copula therefore proves to be unimportant. The upshot
of Figure 2A is that even though we cannot identify the copula in early cohorts, we can be certain
that absolute mobility has declined sharply since the 1940s.
The rest of this section explains why the bounds are tight in the 1940-50 cohorts but grow
wider in more recent cohorts. To begin, Figure 2B plots the marginal distribution of income for
children in the 1940 birth cohort and their parents. Income grew very rapidly across all quantiles of
the income distribution between 1940 and 1970. As a result, there is very little overlap between the
income distributions of children born in 1940 and their parents. For example, a child born to parents
at the 80th percentile of the parent income distribution needed to reach just the 14th percentile of the
childrens income distribution to exceed her parents income. In the extreme case in which the
distribution of child income lies everywhere above the distribution of parental income i.e., the
poorest child earns more than the richest parent absolute mobility would be 100% irrespective of
which children are linked to which parents. Although the 1940 parent and child income distributions
are not fully separated, we show below that they are sufficiently close to this scenario to render the
copula unimportant for calculating absolute mobility.
In contrast, recent cohorts experienced much less growth across most quantiles of the income
distribution (e.g., Goldin and Katz 2008, Autor 2014). Figure 2C illustrates this point by replicating
Figure 2B for the 1980 birth cohort. Because growth rates were much lower between 1980 and 2010,
there is substantial overlap between parents and childrens income distributions (at age 30) for
children born in 1980. Children with parents at the 80th percentile of the income distribution now
need to reach the 74th percentile of their cohorts income distribution to earn more than their parents.
Figure 2D shows why the greater degree of overlap between childrens and parents income
distributions in recent cohorts leads to wider bounds on absolute mobility. The curves in this figure
10
plot the income rank a child must reach to earn more than her parents as a function of her parents
income percentile, separately for the 1940 and 1980 birth cohorts. For example, in order to earn more
than parents at the 80th percentile, children need to reach the 14th percentile in the 1940 cohort and
the 74th percentile in the 1980 cohort, as shown in Figures 2B and 2C.
The copula can be visualized in Figure 2D as the distribution of mass within the ( , )
square. Absolute mobility can be calculated by summing the mass in the copula that lies above the
relevant curve. The empirically observed copula for the 1980-82 cohorts used in our baseline analysis
is shown by the shading in the figure, with darker colors representing areas with higher density. The
mass is clustered around the diagonal, reflecting positive intergenerational persistence of income.
Absolute mobility is 50% for the 1980 cohort because half of the mass of this copula lies above the
curve plotted for the 1980 cohort.
Our bounding procedure minimizes and maximizes the amount of mass in the copula that
falls above the curves in Figure 2D, subject to the FOSD and integration constraints specified above.
Since the child rank required to beat parents is very close to the 45-degree line for the 1980 cohort,
rates of absolute mobility are very sensitive to whether the mass in the copula lies just above or
below the diagonal. This shows why we obtain wide bounds when searching over all copulas for the
1980 cohort.17 In contrast, because the child rank required to earn more than parents is very low at
nearly all percentiles of the parent income distribution for the 1940 cohort, all feasible copulas
generate high levels of absolute mobility for that cohort.

IV. Sensitivity and Heterogeneity Analysis

In this section, we first assess the sensitivity of our baseline estimates to key specification
choices, such as the price deflator and definition of income. We then examine heterogeneity in trends
in absolute mobility across subgroups.

Sensitivity Analysis. We begin by considering alternative price deflators. Prior work has argued that
the CPI-U-RS may overstate inflation by failing to account adequately for improvements in product
quality and for the introduction of new goods (Boskin et al. 1996, Broda et al. 2009). Prior work on
the measurement of trends in poverty recommends subtracting 0.8 percentage points from the annual

17
The copulas for the 1980 cohort used to produce the upper and lower bounds in Figure 2A are displayed in Figure
S1. The copula that generates the upper bound concentrates mass just below the 1980 curve shown in Figure 2D,
while the copula that generates the lower bound concentrates mass just above that curve.

11
inflation rate implied by the CPI-U-RS to account for such biases (Meyer and Sullivan 2009, Broda
and Weinstein 2010). The series in squares in Figure 3A replicates the baseline series on absolute
mobility by cohort in Figure 1B using this adjusted price index. As expected, this adjustment
increases absolute mobility in recent cohorts, as it increases real income growth rates across the
distribution. However, the magnitude of the change is small: with the adjusted series, absolute
mobility falls from 93% in 1940 to 59% in the 1984 cohort. Even subtracting 2 percentage points
from the inflation rate implied by the CPI-U-RS a conservative adjustment larger than virtually all
existing estimates of the bias due to new goods still results in a 26 percentage point decline in
absolute mobility from 1940-1984 (Figure S2).
We also consider a variety of other commonly used price indices: (a) the Personal
Consumption Expenditure Price Index (PCEPI), an index that includes a broader bundle of goods
than the CPI; (b) the Producer Price Index (PPI), an index constructed based on prices at the producer
level; (c) the GDP deflator, an index that covers all goods used domestically; and (d) the CPI-U
series that is most commonly used to measure inflation.18 All of these alternative indices produce
time series of absolute mobility very similar to our baseline estimates (Figure 3A, Figure S2).
Our baseline analysis uses pre-tax measures of earnings rather than net income after taxes
and transfers. Conceptually, it is not clear which of these income definitions provides a better
measure of absolute mobility, as individuals sense of progress might differ if they achieve upward
mobility through government transfers rather than their own earnings. We assess whether the
distinction matters empirically in Figure 3B by replicating our baseline analysis using post-tax and
transfer incomes. We estimate tax liabilities for parents and children using the National Bureau of
Economic Research TAXSIM model, which is available since 1960. Before 1960, we use data on
federal marginal tax rates, adjusted for personal exemptions by marital status and number of children,
applying the data in Wilson (2002). We estimate the value of transfers as the sum of Aid to Families
with Dependent Children, General Assistance, Supplemental Security Income, and the cash value of
in-kind transfers.19 Accounting for taxes and transfers increases the level of absolute mobility by
around 3 percentage points in all cohorts, but does not affect the trend in absolute mobility
appreciably. This is because taxes and transfers affect the incomes of both parents and their children,

18
The CPI-U-RS (research series) adjusts the CPI-U by correcting for substitution between existing products
following Boskin et al. (1996), and generates inflation rates about 0.5% lower than the CPI-U.
19
We obtain estimates of in-kind transfers from Fox et al. (2015), who estimate total benefits from SNAP, WIC,
housing assistance, the School Lunch Program, and LIHEAP by combining CPS and administrative data. These data
are available starting in 1967; we do not account for in-kind transfers before 1967. Meyer, Mok, and Sullivan (2015)
show that transfers are under-reported by approximately 50% in survey data; we find that doubling the amount of
transfers reported does not affect our estimates significantly.

12
and because the expansion of transfer programs in recent years has targeted the bottom of the income
distribution, where rates of absolute mobility are already high even in pre-tax terms (Figure 1A).
In our baseline analysis, we measure childrens incomes at age 30. One may be concerned
that children take a longer time to reach peak lifecycle earnings in more recent cohorts, which could
lead to a spurious downward trend in rates of absolute mobility. Figure 3C addresses this concern by
replicating our baseline analysis measuring income at age 40 for children (for the 1940-74 cohorts)
and at ages 35-45 for parents. This series continues to exhibit a sharp decline in absolute mobility
across birth cohorts. The time pattern of the decline is shifted backward by approximately 10 years,
consistent with measuring incomes 10 years later.
The fraction of individuals who are married at age 30 and the size of families have both
fallen steadily in recent decades (Parker 2015). One widely used approach to adjusting for changes in
household size is to divide family income by the square root of the number of family members in the
household (e.g., Johnson et al. 2005). Figure 3D shows that when we divide our baseline income
measures by the square root of family size, rates of absolute mobility fall from 93% in 1940 to 60%
in 1984.20 As an alternative approach, one can measure income at the individual rather than
household level. The series in triangles in Figure 3D compares the individual earnings of sons to their
fathers, as in prior studies of intergenerational mobility (e.g., Lee and Solon 2009). Here, we find a
steeper decline in absolute mobility than in our baseline specification: the fraction of sons earning
more than their fathers fell from 95% in 1940 to 41% in 1984. Together, these results show that
accounting for trends in family size and the number of earners does not affect the qualitative
conclusion that absolute mobility has fallen substantially.
Beyond the specific factors considered above, one may be concerned that levels of absolute
mobility for recent cohorts may still be understated because of increases in fringe benefits, non-
market goods, or under-reporting of income in the CPS (Bollinger et al. 2015, Piketty, Saez, and
Zucman 2016). As an omnibus approach to assessing the potential bias from such factors, we
recalculate absolute mobility for the 1984 birth after increasing each childs income by various fixed
dollar amounts. Adding $1,000 to every childs income in 2014 would increase absolute mobility for
the 1984 cohort to 51% from the baseline estimate of 50%; adding $10,000 would increase absolute
mobility to only 61% (Figure S4). These calculations show that plausible adjustments to childrens
incomes are unlikely to change the conclusion that absolute mobility has fallen sharply from the rates
of 80-90% experienced by children born in the 1940s and 1950s.

20
Even the most conservative adjustment of dividing by the total number of people in the family continues to show
a 26 percentage point decline in absolute mobility (Figure S3).

13
 In our baseline analysis, we define absolute mobility using a discrete measure of whether
children earn more than their parents. Figure S5 shows that using other thresholds or a more
continuous definition of absolute mobility yields similar results. Panel A shows the fraction of
children earning 20% more than their parents or 20% less than their parents. Both of these thresholds
generate very similar declines in absolute mobility. In Panel B, we plot the median ratio of child to
parent income, a statistic that accounts for the magnitude of the difference between parents and
childrens incomes. This statistic declines from approximately 3 in the 1940 cohort to slightly less
than 1 in the 1984 cohort. These results show that our findings are not sensitive to the exact metric
used to compare childrens earnings to their parents.
Finally, in the Supplementary Appendix (Figures S6-S9), we show that the results are also
robust to a set of other technical issues that arise from data limitations: (a) adjusting for changes in
the definition of family income across Censuses; (b) including immigrants in all years to account for
missing data on immigrant status in early cohorts; (c) using a single Census to measure parents
income instead of pooling data across multiple Censuses; and (d) using data from either the Census
or CPS to measure the incomes of both parents and children from a single dataset.

Heterogeneity. Next, we examine how trends in absolute mobility vary across subgroups. We begin
by examining heterogeneity across states. We define parents states as based on where they live when
we measure their incomes (between ages 25-35). We define childrens state as their state of birth to
account for the possibility that children who grow up in a given state may move elsewhere as adults.
Since childrens state of birth is not observed in the CPS, we use the Census for both parents and
children.21
Figure 4 presents the results by state. Panel A shows absolute mobility by cohort for selected
states (see Table S2 for estimates for all states). Panel B presents a heat map of the change in
absolute mobility from 1940 to 1980 by state, with darker colors representing areas with larger
declines. Absolute mobility fell substantially in all 50 states between the 1940 and 1980 birth
cohorts. Absolute mobility fell particularly sharply in the industrial Midwest, where rates of absolute
mobility fell by 48 percentage points in Michigan and approximately 45 percentage points in Indiana,

21
To increase precision, our state-level analysis includes all children aged 25-35 and uses the 100% Census in 1940
and 5% IPUMS sample in 1980. Measuring childrens incomes from ages 25-35 rather than just at age 30 creates
small differences in levels of absolute mobility. To adjust for these differences, we calculate the difference between
the baseline national estimates and population-weighted national means of our state-level estimates for each cohort,
and add these differences to the state-level estimates.

14
Illinois, and Ohio. The smallest declines occurred in states such as Massachusetts, New York, and
Montana, where absolute mobility fell by approximately 35 percentage points.
Next, we examine heterogeneity by gender. When comparing childrens family incomes to
their parents family incomes as in our baseline analysis, we find similar declines in absolute
mobility for sons and daughters (Figure S10). However, the patterns differ by gender when we focus
on individual earnings. As noted above, sons chances of earning more than their fathers fell steeply,
from 95% in 1940 to 41% in 1984, underscoring the sharp decline in the economic prospects of
American men. In contrast, the fraction of daughters earning more than their fathers fell from 43%
for the 1940 birth cohort to 22% in 1960, and then rose slightly to 26% in 1984. The pattern for
womens individual earnings differs because of the rise in female labor force participation rates and
earnings over the period we study (Figure S11).
In sum, the subgroup analysis shows that declines in absolute mobility have been a
systematic, widespread phenomenon throughout the United States since 1940.

V. Counterfactual Scenarios

Why have rates of absolute income mobility fallen so sharply over the last half century, and
what policies can restore absolute mobility to earlier levels? We use counterfactual simulations to
evaluate the effects of two key trends over the past half century: declining rates of GDP growth and
greater inequality in the distribution of GDP (Piketty and Saez 2003, Goldin and Katz 2008).
We consider two counterfactual scenarios. The first, a higher GDP growth scenario, asks
what would have happened to absolute mobility for the 1980 cohort if the economy had grown as
quickly during their lifetimes as it did in the mid-twentieth century, but with GDP distributed across
households as it is today. The second more broadly shared growth scenario asks the converse: what
if total GDP grew at the rate observed in recent decades, but GDP was allocated across households as
it was for the 1940 birth cohort? The first scenario expands the size of the economic pie, dividing it
in the proportions by which it is divided today. The second keeps the size of the pie fixed, but divides
it more evenly as in the past.
We calculate childrens counterfactual incomes under the higher GDP growth scenario as
follows. Let denote the observed GDP per working-age family in year t.22 We first define the

22
We define working-age families as families with at least one member between the ages of 18 and 64. We
normalize GDP by the number of working-age families to control for changes in GDP due to changes in the number
of working-age adults.

15

share of GDP that goes to children at percentile q of the 1980 cohort in 2010 as ,1980 =

,1980 /2010 , where ,1980 is the qth percentile of the income distribution in 2010 for children in the
1980 cohort. We then construct a counterfactual level of GDP per working-age family in 2010,

2010 = 1980 1.02530 , under the assumption that real GDP per family grew at a rate of 2.5% per
year from 1980 to 2010. This 2.5% growth rate is comparable to the real growth rate per working-age
family from 1940-1970, and is one percentage point per year higher than the actual annualized
growth rate from 1980-2010 of 1.5%.23 Finally, we define a counterfactual marginal income
distribution for children in the 1980 cohort as
,1
,1980 = ,1980 2010 (4)
The counterfactual income for children at percentile q is given by the share of GDP going to 30 year
olds at percentile q in 2010 multiplied by the level of GDP that would have prevailed in 2010 had
children in the 1980 cohort experienced GDP growth from birth to age 30 comparable to that
experienced by children born in the 1940s.
For the more broadly shared growth scenario, we follow the same approach as above to

calculate the share of GDP that goes to children at percentile q of the 1940 cohort in 1970, ,1940 =

,1940 /1970 . We then apply these shares to the observed level of 2010 GDP to construct a
counterfactual income distribution for the 1980 birth cohort:
,2
,1980 = ,1940 2010 (5)
This counterfactual represents the incomes 30 year olds would have had in 2010 if GDP in 2010 were
allocated across households in the same proportions as in 1970.
After calculating the counterfactual income distributions for children in the 1980 cohort,
,1 100 ,2 100
{,1980 }=1 and {,1980 }=1 , we use the same copula and parent marginal income distributions as
above to compute counterfactual rates of absolute mobility by parent income percentile. Figure 5A
presents the results. The top and bottom curves in the figure reproduce the empirical series for the
1940 and 1980 cohorts from Figure 1A. The dotted and dashed series show absolute mobility rates
that would have been observed for the 1980 cohort under the counterfactuals in (4) and (5).
Under the higher growth counterfactual, the mean rate of absolute mobility is 62%. This rate
is 12 percentage points higher than the empirically observed value of 50% in 1980, but closes only
29% of the decline relative to the 92% rate of absolute mobility in the 1940 cohort. The increase in
absolute mobility is especially modest given the magnitude of the change in the aggregate economy:
23
The 1.5% growth rate of GDP per working-age family corresponds to total real GDP growth of 2.8% per year,
while the 2.5% growth rate of GDP per working-age family corresponds to total real GDP growth of 3.8% per year.

16
a growth rate of 2.5% per working-age family from 1980 to 2010 would have led to GDP of $20
trillion in 2010, $5 trillion (35%) higher than the actual level.
The more broadly shared growth scenario increases the average rate of absolute mobility to
80%, closing 71% of the gap in absolute mobility between the 1940 and 1980 cohorts. The broadly
shared growth counterfactual has larger effects on absolute mobility at the bottom of the income
distribution, whereas the higher growth counterfactual has larger effects at higher income levels.
Since income shares of GDP are larger for high-income individuals, higher growth rates benefit those
with higher incomes the most, while a more equal distribution benefits those at the bottom the most.
The results in Figure 5A imply that much of the decline in absolute mobility is due to
changes in the distribution of growth rather than reductions in aggregate growth rates. In Figure 5B,
we ask what rates of GDP growth would be necessary to return to mid-century rates of absolute
mobility under todays income distribution. We plot mean rates of upward mobility under real GDP

per family growth rates from 1% to 10%, recalculating 2010 and applying (4) to generate
counterfactual income distributions. Achieving rates of absolute mobility above 80% under todays
income distribution would require sustained real per-family growth greater than 5% per year (or total
real GDP growth above 6.4%), well above the historical experience of the United States since World
War II.
To see why absolute mobility is not very responsive to the growth rate when growth is
distributed unequally, consider the extreme case in which one child obtains all of the increase in
GDP. In this case, higher GDP growth rates would have no effect on absolute mobility. More
generally, GDP growth has larger effects on absolute mobility when growth is spread more broadly,
allowing more children to achieve higher living standards than their parents. Higher GDP growth and
a broader distribution of growth have a multiplicative effect on absolute mobility: absolute mobility
is highest when GDP growth rates are high and growth is spread broadly across the distribution.
In the Supplementary Appendix, we show that similar results are obtained when using
counterfactuals for the change in incomes from 1980 to 2010 based on shares of GDP growth over
that period rather than counterfactuals for the level of incomes in 2010. Measuring incomes at age 40
instead of 30 also yields similar results (Figure S12).
In sum, the counterfactuals show that higher growth rates alone are insufficient to restore
absolute mobility to the levels observed in mid-century America. A broader distribution of income

17
growth is necessary to revive absolute mobility, and can itself be sufficient to reverse much of the
decline since 1940 even if growth were to remain at current levels.24

VI. Conclusion

The analysis in this paper yields two main results. First, childrens prospects of earning more
than their parents have faded over the past half century in the U.S. The fraction of children earning
more than their parents fell from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to around 50% for
children entering the labor market today. Absolute income mobility has fallen across the entire
income distribution, with the largest declines for families in the middle class. These findings contrast
with prior research showing that relative mobility measured, for instance, by the correlation
between parents and childrens incomes remained stable in recent decades (e.g., Lee and Solon
2009, Chetty et al. 2014b). The measures of absolute mobility we focus on in this study differ from
relative mobility because they compare levels of earnings across generations by bringing in data on
the marginal income distributions of parents and children. Absolute mobility has fallen over time
while relative mobility has remained stable because income growth has stagnated across much of the
income distribution in recent decades.
Second, most of the decline in absolute mobility is driven by the more unequal distribution of
economic growth in recent decades rather than the slowdown in GDP growth rates. In this sense, the
rise in inequality and the decline in absolute mobility are closely linked. Growth is an important
driver of absolute mobility, but high levels of absolute mobility require broad-based growth across
the income distribution. With the current distribution of income, higher GDP growth rates alone are
insufficient to restore absolute mobility to the levels experienced by children in the 1940s and 1950s.
If one wants to revive the American Dream of high rates of absolute mobility, then one must have
an interest in growth that is spread more broadly across the income distribution.

24
Plausible changes in relative mobility (the copula) also have modest effects on average rates of absolute mobility.
For example, a uniform copula where childrens ranks are independent of their parents ranks would still
produce absolute upward mobility for the 1980 cohort of 50%. Greater relative mobility produces higher rates of
absolute mobility for children with low-income parents while reducing rates of absolute mobility for children with
high-income parents, leaving average absolute mobility essentially unchanged.

18
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Supplementary Appendix
This appendix contains three sections. Section I describes how we construct our samples and define
the key variables used in the baseline specifications and sensitivity analyses. Section II presents a set
of supplementary robustness checks that address various limitations of our data. Section III presents
further detail on the methods underlying the counterfactual simulations and supplementary
counterfactual results. Stata and Matlab code to reproduce all of the results in the paper from publicly
available data can be downloaded from www.equality-of-opportunity.org.

Section I: Sample Construction and Variable Definitions

We construct estimates of absolute mobility by combining three sets of data. First, we construct a
series of marginal income distributions for parents using the decadal Census data. Second, we
construct a series of marginal income distributions for children using CPS data. Third, we construct
the joint distribution of parent and child rank (the copula) using de-identified data from federal
income tax returns.

In this section, we describe how we construct each of these three elements. We then discuss how we
combine them to estimate absolute mobility in our baseline specification. Finally, we summarize
supplementary data used for sensitivity analyses, such as alternative price deflators and data on taxes
and transfers.

A. Parents Income Distributions

Sample Construction

We obtain data on parents incomes from the 1940 to 2000 U.S. Censuses, retrieved via the
University of Minnesotas Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). We use the 1% national
random samples provided by IPUMS (except for the state-level analysis in Figure 4, where we use
the 100% sample for 1940 and the 5% sample for 1980). We use the Form 1 Metro sample in 1970
and the Metro sample in 1980 (which are, contrary to their labels, full population samples) and the
unweighted samples in 1990 and 2000.

To construct a sample that can be used without weights, we restrict the 1940 and 1950 Censuses to
self-weighting sample-line persons and their families. Since the CPS data that we use to estimate
childrens incomes does not sample institutional group quarters, we render the Census and CPS
samples comparable by excluding from the Census individuals residing in institutional group quarters
(i.e., correctional and mental institutions, as well as institutions for the elderly and the handicapped)
and residents of the military non-institutional group quarters. For every birth cohort from 1940 to
1984, we restrict our sample to parents who had children between the ages of 16 and 45 (inclusive).
In two-parent households, we define the representative parent as the spouse with the higher total
personal income, and use this parents age when restricting the sample.

We follow the rules established by IPUMS to determine parent-child relationships, as well as

whether and to whom a respondent is married.25 Children for whom no parent-child link can be made
25
We determine marital status and partner using both the SPLOC and MARST variables. For more detail, see
https://usa.ipums.org/usa/chapter5/chapter5.shtml.

22
 that is, for whom both mothers and fathers location in the household are not recorded are
dropped from the sample.

Baseline Income Definitions

Our baseline definition of family income varies across Census years because the income variables
change across the Censuses. A complete list of the underlying IPUMS-USA variables used to
construct our measures of parental income in each Census year is given in Table S3.

In the 1970 to 2000 Census years, we define parents family income as the sum of spouses pre-tax
total personal income, minus income derived from Aid to Families with Dependent Children, General
Assistance, and Supplemental Security Income.

Prior to 1970, data on income from public assistance programs is unavailable in the Census.
Therefore, in the 1960 Census, parental income is defined simply as the sum of spouses total
personal income. In 1950, where personal income is only available for sample-line household heads,
the sum of spouses income cannot be computed. Here, we define parents family income as the sum
of the sample-line household heads total income, plus any income from other members of the
primary family (including business, farm, and wage income, as well as from other, unspecified
sources).

In the 1940 Census, only data on wages and salaries is available, as well as an indicator of whether
respondents had more than $50 in non-wage, non-salary income. For 1940, we therefore impute
average non-wage, non-salary income from the 1950 Census (adjusted for inflation) for each
combination of occupation (using the detailed 1950 Census Bureau occupational classification), self-
employed status, race (black, white, other), and the indicator for non-wage income above $50.
Parents family income in 1940 thus comprises the sum of spouses wages, as well as their imputed
non-wage income.

Inflation Adjustment

In our baseline specifications, we adjust for inflation using the Consumer Price Index Research
Series (CPI-U-RS), available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1977 onward. For all prior
years, we follow the Census Bureau in applying the 1977 CPI-U-RS-to-CPI-U ratio to the CPI-U of
previous years. Since income in Census and CPS refers to income earned in the previous calendar
year, inflation adjustments are also applied to that calendar year. For instance, in the 1960 Census,
income refers to income earned in 1959; our inflation adjustment thus pertains to 1959 U.S. dollars.

Construction of Marginal Distributions

As described in Section I of the text, we combine several Censuses to measure income between ages
25-35 (inclusive) for parents who had children in a given birth cohort c. In particular, we pool all
individuals between the ages of 25 and 35 (at the time of the survey) in the available Census samples
who had a child in cohort c. However, when drawing records from Censuses before year c (i.e., for
parents who had children after age 35), we measure the incomes of all adults between ages 25-35 and

23
assign them weight equivalent to the fraction of adults who have children in cohort c after age 35.
This is because we naturally cannot observe who will have children in the future.26

For children born in 1940, we cannot secure income measurements from prior Censuses because
income data were not collected prior to the 1940 Census. We therefore use income measurements
from the 1940 Census itself for these older parents, pooling parents up to age 45.27 Likewise, because
we can only reach back to the 1940 Census for the 1941-1949 birth cohorts, the income
measurements for parents who had children in these earlier birth cohorts are also taken at slightly
older ages on average relative to the measurements for parents who had children more recently.
These age differences make it slightly more difficult for children of these early cohorts to exceed the
income of their parents, reducing our estimate of the decline in absolute mobility.

We compute marginal income distributions for parents of children in each birth cohort by first
estimating the cutoff values for the 100 percentile ranks and then calculating mean incomes within
each percentile. We exclude parents with zero income when estimating the parental marginal income
distribution. Parents with zero income are reintroduced in the final step of our absolute mobility
calculations, described in Subsection D below.

B. Childrens Income Distributions

Sample Construction

We obtain data on childrens incomes from the 1970-2014 Annual Social and Economic
Supplements of the Current Population Surveys (CPS-ASEC). We include only respondents who are
30 years old. We exclude all respondents who reported a birthplace outside of the United States
starting in 1994 (information on birthplace is unavailable prior to 1994).

Baseline Income Definitions

Childrens income is defined analogously to parents family income, namely as the sum of spouses
total personal income minus income from welfare and Supplemental Security Income. Table S4 lists
the variables in the IPUMS-CPS that we use to construct our measures of childrens income.

To account for the different thresholds used to top code income across different years of the CPS-
ASEC, we use the Census Bureaus income component rank proximity swap values for 1976-2010
(which are constructed using restricted CPS data that are not top-coded).28 We apply this procedure
to all income components separately (such as wages and business income), and then sum them to
obtain total personal income.

Construction of Marginal Distributions

26
Our approach double counts the incomes of individuals who have children at exactly age 25 or 35. We adopt this
approach to obtain a symmetric window around age 30. Measuring incomes when parents are between ages 25 and
34 or 26 and 35 to avoid double counting yields estimates of absolute mobility that bracket the estimates we report.
27
Because we do not use data on parents incomes from earlier Censuses, the number of observations used to
construct parents income distributions for the 1940 birth cohort is lower than for subsequent cohorts (Table S1).
28
For further detail on this procedure, see https://cps.ipums.org/cps/income_cell_means.shtml

24
To construct marginal income distributions for each birth cohort, we again estimate the cutoff values
for every percentile and then calculate mean incomes within each percentile. We account for the
CPSs stratified sampling scheme by using person-level sampling weights provided for use with
ASEC when estimating the percentile cutoff values.

Our income estimates from our CPS-ASEC samples closely match the trends in median individual
income by gender published in Table P-8 of the Census Bureaus Historical Income Tables based on
CPS data (see Figure S11). For purposes of this comparison, we extend our sample to include all
individuals aged 25-34 and exclude individuals with no reported individual income.

C. Copula

The copula we use is the 100 x 100 percentile transition matrix constructed by Chetty et al. (2014a,
Online Data Table 1).29 We briefly summarize the methodology used to construct this copula below;
see Chetty et al. (2014a, Appendix A) for further information.

Sample Construction

The sample consists of the set of children in Social Security Administration population records who
are born between 1980-1982 and are U.S. citizens as of 2013. For each child, we then define the
parent(s) as the first person(s) who claim the child as a dependent on a 1040 tax form. Ninety percent
of children born between 1980 and 1982 can be linked to parents based on dependent claiming. We
limit the sample to children who can be linked to parents.

Income Definitions

We define both parents and childrens family income in the tax data as follows. In years where the
individual files a tax return, we define family income as Adjusted Gross Income (as reported on the
1040 tax return) plus tax-exempt interest income and the non-taxable portion of Social Security and
Disability benefits. In years where the individual does not file a tax return, we define family income
as the sum of wage earnings (reported on form W-2), unemployment benefits (reported on form
1099-G), and gross social security and disability benefits (reported on form SSA-1099). In years
where the individual has no tax return and no information returns, family income is coded as zero.

We average parents family income over the five years from 1996 to 2000 (the earliest years
available in the sample) to obtain a proxy for parent lifetime income that is less affected by transitory
fluctuations. We define child family income as mean income over the last two years in the data (2011
and 2012), when children in the 1980-82 cohorts are in their early thirties.

Construction of Copula

We exclude parents with zero or negative income when constructing the copula because parents with
no earnings typically do not file a tax return and hence cannot be linked to their children based on
dependent claiming. After excluding parents with zero income, we assign parents percentile ranks
based on their incomes relative to other parents in the sample. Children are assigned percentile ranks
based on their incomes relative to other children in the same birth cohort. We estimate the copula

29
This table can be downloaded from http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/index.php/data.

25
non-parametrically as a 100100 matrix that gives the joint probability of each child and parent
percentile rank pair.

For simplicity, we use the same copula when analyzing subgroups (by gender and state). Using
gender-specific or state-specific copulas yields very similar estimates of mean absolute mobility by
cohort (not reported). We also use the same copula when measuring income at age 40, motivated by
evidence that distribution of income ranks is stable between the ages of 30 and 60 (Chetty et al.
2014a).

D. Constructing Absolute Mobility

We combine the copula and the marginal income distributions for each birth cohort to calculate the
fraction of children who earn as much or more than their parents at each parental income percentile.
The mean absolute mobility for a given cohort is simply the average of the rates of absolute mobility
across all parental income levels. We include parents with zero income when computing these
cohort-level averages, noting that children whose parents have zero income always earn at least as
much as their parents. Formally, we calculate mean absolute mobility in cohort c as

Ac = zc + (1 zc)Ac | Par_Inc >0 , (1)

where zc is the fraction of parents with zero income in cohort c and Ac | Par_Inc >0 is mean absolute
mobility for positive parental income (computed as an unweighted mean of absolute mobility across
percentiles).

E. Variable Definitions for Sensitivity and Heterogeneity Analysis

This subsection defines the variables used for the sensitivity and heterogeneity analysis in Section IV
of the paper.

Alternative Price Deflators

We obtain additional deflators (PCEPI, PPI, GDP Deflator, CPI-U) from the Federal Reserve
Economic Data (FRED) database from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Taxes and Transfers

We estimate taxes using the NBER TAXSIM model (Feenberg et al. 1993). TAXSIM provides
federal tax estimates starting in 1960. We use it to estimate federal tax liability after credits for
children in all cohorts and for parents in 1960 and thereafter. To estimate taxes for parents prior to
1960, we use data on federal marginal tax rates and exemptions from Wilson (2002).

We compute taxes in TAXSIM using the following variables: year, marital status, age of the primary
and secondary taxpayers, wages and salary income (replicating the definitions in our baseline income
specification), and number of dependents. We use the output variable FIITAX, the federal income tax
liability after credits. When using marginal tax rates (prior to 1960), we determine exemptions based
on marital status and the number of dependents.

We use two sources of data to measure transfers. First, we use the CPS and Census to measure the
value of cash transfers from welfare programs and Supplemental Security Income. In particular, we
26
add in the variables incwelfr and incssi in IPUMS-CPS, and incwelfr and incsupp in IPUMS-USA.
We are able to measure these transfers for children in all years and for parents from 1970 onward.

Second, we include estimates of in-kind transfers from Fox et al. (2015), which cover SNAP, WIC,
housing assistance, the School Lunch Program, and LIHEAP. Data on in-kind transfers are only
available from 1967 onward. Prior to 1967, these transfers are set to zero. Fox et al. (2015) use CPS
and administrative data to estimate mean transfers (with and without tax credits) by marital status,
number of children, age categories, and family income decile for each year. We use these four
criteria to bin our observations and then assign everyone in each bin the corresponding average
transfer amount. Families with positive income are assigned the mean transfer excluding tax credits,
and families with incomes of zero or less are assigned mean transfer including tax credits. This is
because families with positive incomes have already had their tax-credits accounted for by
TAXSIM.30

Alternative Income Measures

We use the following alternative income definitions for sensitivity analyses (Figure S6):

Total family income is defined as the sum of personal incomes of all co-residing members of the
same primary family (e.g., siblings, parents, or any other relatives). In our baseline analysis, we use
the sum of spouses total personal income minus income from welfare after 1950; however, we rely
on total family income to measure parents income in the 1950 Census as spouses total personal
income is not reported. The total family income definition is consistent across all years starting with
the 1950 Census.

Wage and salary income is defined as the sum of spouses income from wages and salaries. In our
baseline analysis, we use wage and salary income to measure incomes in the 1940 Census
(supplemented by imputed non-wage, non-salary income) because measures of total family income
and spousal income are not available. The wage and salary income measure is consistent across all
years starting with the 1940 Census.

Section II: Additional Robustness Checks

In this section, we present a set of supplementary robustness checks that address various limitations
of the data we use.

First, our baseline analysis measures parents family income as the sum of spouses total personal
income in the 1960-1980 Censuses. However, the 1950 Census only reports total family income,
while the 1940 Census includes only wages and salaries, forcing us to use different income
definitions in these earlier years as discussed above. Figure S6 shows that the trend in absolute
mobility is very similar if we use alternative income definitions that do not change across Censuses:
the sum of the spouses wage and salary income only or total family income, defined as the sum of
income earned by all co-residing members of the primary family.

30
The estimates on credits provided by TAXSIM are frequently higher than Fox et al. (2015), consistent with under-
reporting of credits in the survey data (Meyer, Mok, and Sullivan 2015). To check whether such under-reporting
affects our results, we implement specifications doubling the transfers reported by Fox et al. (2015). Our baseline
estimates of absolute mobility are not affected appreciably by such a correction.

27
Second, the CPS data does not record individuals birthplace before 1994. As a result, our baseline
series excludes immigrants starting with the 1964 cohort. To verify that this change in the treatment
of immigrants does not affect our results, Figure S7 includes immigrants in the calculation of
childrens marginal income distributions for all cohorts. Absolute mobility is slightly lower when
immigrants are included because immigrants tend to have lower earnings than natives on average, but
the trends are similar to our baseline results.

Third, in our baseline analysis, we pool data across multiple Censuses to measure the incomes of all
parents between the ages of 25 and 35. This procedure provides an imperfect measure of parents
incomes because it relies on the assumption that the income distribution of those who have children
after age 35 is representative of the income distribution of the general population and because it does
not account for mortality or changes in parents marital status across Censuses. To assess the
robustness of our findings to these concerns, we replicate our analysis using only a single Census to
measure parents incomes, restricting parents age at childbirth to be between 25 and 35. Figure S8
shows that we obtain very similar results when we focus on this subsample of parents.

Finally, the baseline results combine data for parents from the Census with data from the CPS for
children. The use of the CPS for children permits measurement of childrens income in each birth
cohort at exactly age 30, while the use of the Census for parents allows us to obtain data on parents
incomes back to 1940 (as the CPS began collecting comprehensive income data only in 1967). To
ensure that mixing income information from two different datasets does not produce bias, we
estimate marginal income distributions using either the Census or the CPS for both parents and
children. Figure S9 shows that we obtain very similar estimates of absolute mobility when we use
data from only the Census or only the CPS for both parents and children for the cohorts where data
are available.31

Section III: Counterfactuals

This section provides further detail on the methodology used to construct the counterfactuals
discussed in Section V of the text and presents an additional set of counterfactuals to assess the
robustness of our conclusions.

A. Methods for Baseline Counterfactuals

Higher GDP Growth Scenario

To construct the higher growth counterfactual, we first calculate the ratio of income at each

percentile q of the income distribution at age 30 for children in the 1980 birth cohort (,1980 ) to

GDP per working-age family in 2010 (2010 ). We measure 2010 using annualized real GDP data
from FRED (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPCA). The number of working-age families is

31
For simplicity, when we measure parents incomes in the CPS, we only include parents between the ages of 25
and 35 who have a child less than one year old at the time of the survey. Unlike in our baseline analysis, we do not
pool earlier or later surveys to include parents who have children before age 25 or after age 35 when estimating
parents incomes using the CPS. This is why the levels of absolute mobility in this series are closer to those in
Figure S8, which shows comparable estimates from our baseline Census-CPS specification. When we estimate
childrens incomes using the Census, we include individuals born in the U.S. who are 30 years old.

28
calculated by summing the household weights of all famunits that contain at least one person aged
18-64 in the Census, excluding those living in group quarters (GQ = 3 or 4).

We then compute counterfactual GDP per working-age family in 2010 (2010 ) by applying 30 years
of a 2.5% annual growth to the 1980 GDP per working-age family of $87,908. This gives a

counterfactual GDP per family of 2010 =$184,393= $87,9081.02530 in 2010, compared to the

observed value of 2010 = $136,198. Finally we create the counterfactual incomes by multiplying the

observed income-to-GDP ratios (,1980 = ,1980 /2010 ) by the counterfactual GDP 2010 .

We use analogous methods to calculate absolute mobility under the alternative annual growth rates of
1-10% presented in Figure 5B.

More Broadly Shared Growth Scenario

To construct the more broadly shared growth counterfactual, we first calculate the ratio of income

at each percentile of the income distribution at age 30 for children in the 1940 birth cohort (,1940 )

to GDP per working-age family in 1970 (1970 ). We then multiply this ratio by the observed 2010

GDP per working-age family of 2010 = $136,198 to obtain a counterfactual income distribution for
children in the 1980 birth cohort.

B. Robustness to Alternative Counterfactuals

Measuring Income at Older Ages

Our more broadly shared growth counterfactual reallocates income not just across different income
groups but also across individuals of different ages. In this subsection, we assess whether this
reallocation across ages affects our conclusion that a broader distribution of growth across income
groups would substantially increase absolute mobility.

To motivate the issue, note that by using the ratio of child incomes at age 30 to GDP per working-age
family to characterize the income distribution, our counterfactuals combine three channels through
which the allocation of GDP affects childrens marginal income distributions. First, within the set of
30 year olds in our sample, the allocation of income has become more unequal over time. In 1970,
the difference between the 90th and 10th percentile of the income distribution of 30 year olds was
$70,011; this difference grew to $118,347 in 2010. Second, the total amount of GDP per working-age
family that accrues to 30 year olds has declined. The average income of 30 year olds in our sample
fell from 69% of GDP per working-age family in 1970 to 44% in 2010. Finally, the total amount of
national income captured in the CPS and Census has declined with the rise of profits and the increase
in top income shares, which are not fully recorded in surveys (Bollinger et al. 2015, Piketty, Saez,
Zucman 2016). The ratio of total income in the CPS to total GDP declined from 73% in 1970 to 60%
in 2010.

To understand the contributions of these three components to our counterfactuals under the broadly
shared growth scenario, we first consider a counterfactual that uses the total income in the CPS (per

working-age family) instead of GDP to measure 2010 . This lowers the estimated rate of absolute
mobility from the baseline value of 80% to 72%. As expected, a broadly shared growth scenario that
does not fully account for the rise of incomes not captured in the CPS generates a lower rate of
absolute upward mobility.

29

Second, we consider a counterfactual that replaces GDP (2010 ) with the total amount of income that
accrues to 30 year olds in the CPS. In this scenario, absolute mobility would be 57%. This result
shows that a significant portion of the increase in absolute mobility in our baseline more broadly
shared growth counterfactual is driven by the fact that 30 year olds today earn a smaller fraction of
GDP than in the past. This finding raises the potential concern that the effects of distributing income
more equally on absolute mobility might differ if we measure incomes at older ages.

We evaluate this concern by repeating our counterfactuals, measuring incomes at age 40 instead of
age 30. We construct counterfactuals for the 1970 cohort, the most recent decadal birth cohort for
whom we can measure income at age 40. For the higher growth scenario, we use the same
counterfactual level of GDP per working-age family in 2010 used for the age 30 counterfactuals,

2010 =$184,393.32 However, we multiply the observed income-to-GDP ratios for 40 year olds in

2010 (,1970 = ,1970 /2010 ) by 2010 to create the counterfactual income distribution at age 40
for the 1970 cohort under higher GDP growth. For the more broadly shared growth scenario, we
calculate income-to-GDP ratios using incomes and GDP in 1980, when the 1940 cohort was 40 years

old. We then multiply these ratios by observed GDP per working-age family in 2010 (2010 ) to
construct estimates of what the 1970 cohort would have earned at age 40 if GDP in 2010 were
allocated more evenly.

Panel A of Figure S12 presents the results of these counterfactuals, along with the actual levels of
absolute mobility observed at age 40 for the 1940 and 1970 birth cohorts. In the data, mean absolute
mobility at age 40 fell from 86% for the 1940 cohort to 56% for the 1970 cohort. Our counterfactual
analysis shows that mean absolute mobility for the 1970 cohort would be 68% under the higher
growth counterfactual, closing 39% of the gap between the two cohorts. Mean absolute mobility
would rise to 74% for the 1970 cohort under the more broadly shared growth counterfactual, closing
59% of the observed gap between the two cohorts. Hence, the qualitative conclusion that more
broadly shared growth would have a substantial effect on absolute mobility is unaffected by
measuring income at later ages. Intuitively, the effect of the changing age distribution of growth
noted above is partly offset by the greater degree of inequality in incomes at older ages, which
increases the impact of changing the income distribution.

Using Shares of GDP Growth Instead of Levels

In our baseline analysis, we construct counterfactual incomes by allocating GDP based on

individuals observed shares of the level of GDP at age 30. An equally reasonable alternative is to
construct counterfactuals based on individuals observed shares of GDP growth from birth to age 30.
In this subsection, we assess whether using growth shares would affect our conclusions.

To construct counterfactual incomes under the higher growth scenario using growth shares, we first
calculate the difference in income between children and parents at each percentile q for the 1980

cohort (,1980 ,1980 ). We then calculate the change in GDP per working-age family from 1980

to 2010 (2010 1980 ). Dividing the difference in income at a given percentile by the change in
GDP gives us the ratio of income to GDP growth at each percentile for the 1980 cohort. We then

32
We use the same counterfactual GDP applying 30 years of a 2.5% annual growth rate to GDP in 1980 even
though children are 40 years old when we measure their incomes because childrens incomes are still measured
approximately 30 years after their parents incomes.

30
multiply these ratios by the counterfactual GDP per family growth of $96,485 the counterfactual

GDP per working-age family of 2010 =$184,393 minus observed 1980 GDP of $87,908 and add
them to the 1980 parent incomes at each percentile to obtain counterfactual incomes for children.

To construct counterfactual incomes under the more broadly shared growth scenario using growth
shares, we first calculate the difference in parent versus child incomes at each percentile of the

income distribution for the 1940 cohort (,1940 ,1940 ). We then divide these differences by the

increase in GDP per working-age family from 1940 to 1970 (1970 1940 ) to obtain the ratio of
income to GDP growth at each percentile for the 1940 cohort. We then multiply these ratios by the
observed change in GDP per working-age family from 1980-2010 of $48,291 ($136,198 in 2010
minus $87,908 in 1980) and add them to the 1980 parent incomes at each percentile to obtain
counterfactual incomes for children.

The results of this alternative approach are presented in Panel B of Figure S12. We find an even
larger impact of the broadly shared growth counterfactual relative to the high growth counterfactual
than in our baseline counterfactuals. Under the broadly shared growth counterfactual, mean absolute
mobility rises to 80%; under the higher growth counterfactual, mean absolute mobility falls to 47%.
This is because many percentiles of the childrens income distribution have fallen relative to their
parents for the 1980 birth cohort. For these groups, allocating growth in accord with how it has
been allocated between 1980-2010 (i.e., using negative growth shares) decreases their incomes
further. Conversely, changing the distribution to the more equal shares of growth experienced by the
1940 cohort has very large effects.

In Panel C of Figure S12, we replicate the growth shares counterfactuals in Panel B, measuring
incomes at age 40 for the 1970 cohort. These counterfactuals are constructed in the same way as
above, except that they use income growth to GDP growth ratios for the years 1950-1980 rather than
1940-1970 in the more broadly shared growth counterfactual. The results at age 40 are very similar
to those at age 30.

In sum, these alternative counterfactuals reinforce the conclusion that higher GDP growth itself
cannot increase absolute mobility unless it is more broadly distributed.

31
 Figure 1. Baseline Estimates of Absolute Mobility by Birth Cohort

A. Selected Cohorts by Parent Income Percentile

100

Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

1940

80
1950

60
1960

40 1970

1980

20

0
0 20 40 60 80 100
Parent Income Percentile (conditional on positive income)

B. Mean Rate of Absolute Mobility by Cohort

100
Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

90

80

70

60

50
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980
Child's Birth Cohort

Notes: This figure plots the fraction of children earning more than their parents (absolute
mobility) by parental income percentile for selected child birth cohorts (Panel A) and on
average by child birth cohort (Panel B). Panel A includes only parents with positive income;
within this group, parents income percentiles are constructed based on their ranks in the
distribution of parents incomes within each child cohort. Panel B includes parents with 0
income, defining absolute mobility as 100% for that subgroup when computing the mean rate of
absolute mobility by cohort. Childrens income is measured at age 30 in the CPS-ASEC as the
sum of individual and spousal income, excluding immigrants after 1994. Parental income is
measured in the Census as the sum of the spouses incomes for families in which the highest
earner is between age 25-35. Childrens and parents incomes are measured in real 2014 dollars
using the CPI-U-RS. Absolute mobility is calculated by combining these income distributions
with the copula estimated for the 1980-82 cohorts in tax data by Chetty et al. (2014a)
 Figure 2. Effects of Copula on Absolute Mobility by Cohort

A. Bounds on Absolute Mobility Across All Copulas B. Family Income Distributions: 1940 Birth Cohort
100
Upper Bound
Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

80
Copula
Observed 80th percentile of parents distribution

60

Density
Baseline Estimates 14th percentile
40
of children's
distribution
Lower Bound

20 Parents Children

1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 0 27k 50k 100k 150k

Child's Birth Cohort Income (Measured in Real 2014$)

C. Family Income Distributions: 1980 Birth Cohort D. Child Rank Needed to Beat Parents and 1980-82 Copula

100

80 (80,74)
Child Income Percentile

80th percentile of parents distribution

60
Density

1980
40

74th percentile of
children's distribution
20 (80,14)
Parents Children 1940
0
0 50k 80k 100k 150k 0 20 40 60 80 100
Income (Measured in Real 2014$) Parent Income Percentile

Notes: These figures show how the copula affects estimates of absolute mobility by birth cohort. Panel A plots bounds on absolute mobility for each
cohort over all copulas satisfying first-order stochastic dominance of childrens income distributions as parent income rises. The bounds are estimated
separately by cohort. The solid circles in Panel A replicate the baseline estimates shown in Figure 1B, with the section to the right of the dashed vertical
line corresponding to the cohorts (1971-1984) for which Chetty et al. (2014b) document copula stability. Panel B plots the marginal family income
distributions of children in the 1940 birth cohort and their parents, measured at approximately age 30. Corresponding to the analysis in Figure 1A, parents
with zero income are excluded, but children with zero income are included when estimating these kernel densities. For scaling purposes, incomes above
$200,000 are excluded. Panel C plots analogous income distributions for children in the 1980 birth cohort and their parents. Panel D plots the income
percentile that a child must reach in order to earn more than his or her parents for the 1940 and 1980 cohorts, with labels corresponding to the examples
shown by the dashed vertical lines in Panels B and C. Panel D also shows a heat map of the baseline copula for the 1980-82 birth cohorts. The copula is a
100x100 matrix where each cell (x,y) gives the probability of a child being in income percentile y and having parents in income percentile x (conditional
on parents having positive income). Darker colors represent areas with higher density in the copula.
 Figure 3. Trends in Absolute Mobility: Sensitivity Analysis

A. Alternative Price Deflators B. Taxes and Transfers

100 Baseline: CPI-U-RS 100 Baseline: Pre-Tax Income
Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

CPI-U-RS minus 0.8% Including Taxes
PCEPI Including Taxes and Transfers
90 PPI 90

80 80

70 70

60 60

50 50
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980
Child's Birth Cohort Child's Birth Cohort

C. Income Measured at Age 40 D. Adjusting for Family Size

100 Baseline: Children Age 30, Parents 25-35 100 Baseline - Family Income, All Children
Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

Children Age 40, Parents 35-45 Divide by Sqrt(Family Size)
Individual Income, Fathers-Sons
90
90

80
80

70

70
60

60
50

50 40
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980
Child's Birth Cohort Child's Birth Cohort

Notes: This figure plots absolute mobility by child birth cohort using a set of alternative income definitions. Panel A presents estimates that use
alternative price deflators to adjust for inflation, including the producer price index (PPI) and the personal consumption expenditure price index (PCEPI).
We also consider a price index that adjusts for bias in the CPI-U-RS due to new and higher quality products by subtracting 0.8% from the annual
inflation rate implied by the CPI-U-RS (Meyer & Sullivan 2009, Broda and Weinstein 2010). Panel B presents estimates using income after including
federal taxes and transfers. Taxes are estimated using the NBER TAXSIM model (Feenberg 1993) for years after 1960, and historical marginal tax rates
before 1960. Transfers include cash and in-kind transfers. Cash transfers are obtained from Census and CPS data. In-kind transfers are obtained from
calculations by Fox et al. (2015) using CPS data from calendar year 1967 onward; prior to 1967, in-kind transfers are set to zero. Panel C plots absolute
mobility when childrens income is measured at age 40 and parental income is measured between ages 35-45. Note that the last year of income data in
our sample is 2014, so absolute mobility can only be measured at age 40 until the 1974 birth cohort. Panel D presents estimates that adjust income for
family size and number of earners. In the series in open circles, we divide the baseline measures of family income by the square root of family size
(defined as the number of dependent children plus the number of adults) for both parents and children. In the series in triangles, we estimate the fraction
of sons whose individual incomes are greater than or equal to their fathers individual incomes. Individual income is defined in the same way as the
baseline family income measure, but does not include spousal income.
 Figure 4. Trends in Absolute Mobility by State

A. Absolute Mobility by Birth Cohort for Selected States

100 Massachusetts

Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

New York
Ohio
90
Michigan

80

70

60

50

40
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980
Child's Birth Cohort

B. Decline in Absolute Mobility from 1940 to 1980 Cohort by State

Decline in Abs. Mob.

from 1940-80

Notes: This figure shows trends in absolute mobility by state. Panel A shows estimates for decadal
birth cohorts for selected states; data by cohort for all other states is reported in Table S2. Panel B
shows a heat map of the magnitude of the decline in absolute mobility from the 1940 to 1980
cohorts, with darker colors representing states with larger declines. For parents, state refers to
location at the time incomes are measured (between ages 25-35); for children, state refers to
location at birth. Since childrens state of birth is not observed in the CPS, we use the Census for
both parents and children. To increase precision, we include all children aged 25-35 and use the
100% Census in 1940 and 5% IPUMS sample in 1980. Measuring childrens incomes from ages
25-35 rather than just at age 30 creates small differences in levels of absolute mobility. To adjust
for these differences, we calculate the difference between the baseline national estimates and
population-weighted national means of our state-level estimates for each cohort, and add these
differences to the state-level estimates.
 Figure 5. Absolute Mobility for 1980 Birth Cohort: Counterfactual Scenarios

A. Counterfactual Rates of Absolute Mobility by Parent Income Percentile

100
Mean AM:91.5%
1940 Empirical

Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

80
Mean AM:79.6%

60
Mean AM:61.9%

40
Mean AM:50.0%

1980 Empirical

20

1980 GDP/family growth rate (1.5%), 1940 income shares

1940 GDP/family growth rate (2.5%), 1980 income shares
0
0 20 40 60 80 100
Parent Income Percentile (conditional on positive income)

B. Counterfactual Absolute Mobility for 1980 Cohort vs. GDP Growth Rate

100
Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

1940 Empirical
90

80

70

60

1980 Empirical
50

40
0 2 4 6 8 10
Real GDP/Family Growth Rate (%)

Notes: This figure shows how absolute mobility for the 1980 cohort would change under counterfactual
scenarios varying GDP growth rates or the distribution of income. Panel A plots absolute mobility by parent
income percentile. The solid curves replicate the baseline estimates of observed absolute mobility by parent
income percentile from Figure 1A for the 1940 and 1980 birth cohorts. The dashed series, 1940 GDP/family
growth rate (2.5%), 1980 income shares, plots the rates of absolute mobility that the 1980 cohort would have
experienced had GDP per working-age family grown at 2.5% annually from 1980-2010 instead of the actual
rate of 1.5%. The resulting higher level of GDP in 2010 is allocated to households based on the ratio of
income to GDP per working family at each percentile of the family income distribution for 30 year olds in
2010. The dotted series, 1980 GDP/family growth rate (1.5%), 1940 income shares plots the rates of
absolute mobility that the 1980 cohort would have experienced had GDP in 2010 been allocated in the same
manner across households as it was for the 1940 cohort. In this counterfactual, GDP remains at the observed
level in 2010, but income is allocated to households based on the ratio of income to GDP per working family
at each percentile in the 1940 cohort. For each series, we also report the mean level of absolute mobility
(AM), averaging across all income percentiles (including parents with zero incomes, whose children
mechanically have absolute mobility of 100% and are not shown in the figure). In Panel B, the solid line plots
mean absolute mobility for the 1980 cohort had they experienced alternative GDP growth rates. These
estimates are constructed in the same way as the estimate of AM for the 1940 GDP/family growth rate
(2.5%), 1980 income shares series in Panel A, using growth rates ranging from 1% to 10%. The dashed
horizontal lines show the actual levels of AM for the 1940 and 1980 birth cohorts. See Section III of the
Supplementary Appendix for further details on these counterfactuals.
 Figure S1. Copulas that Maximize and Minimize Absolute Mobility for 1980 Cohort

A. Copula that Generates Upper Bound for Absolute Mobility

100

80
Child Income Percentile

60

40

20

0
0 20 40 60 80 100
Parent Income Percentile (conditional on positive income)

B. Copula that Generates Lower Bound for Absolute Mobility

100

80
Child Income Percentile

60

40

20

0
0 20 40 60 80 100
Parent Income Percentile (conditional on positive income)

Notes: This figure depicts the copulas that generate the bounds on absolute mobility for the 1980 cohort in Figure 2A. Panel A
presents the copula that generates the upper bound on absolute mobility, while Panel B presents the copula that generates the
lower bound on absolute mobility. Darker shades represent cells with greater mass in the copula. The solid curve in both panels
shows the rank that a child must reach in order to surpass the income of their parents by parental income percentile in the 1980
birth cohort, as in Figure 2D.
 Figure S2. Alternative Price Deflators
Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

100 Baseline: CPI-U-RS

CPI-U-RS Minus 2%
GDP Deflator
90
CPI-U

80

70

60

50

1940 1950 1960 1970 1980

Child's Birth Cohort

Notes: This figure plots absolute mobility by birth cohort, replicating Figure 3A with alternatives to our baseline price deflator
(the CPI-U-RS): the GDP deflator, the CPI-U, and a price index that subtracts 2% from the annual inflation rate implied by the
CPI-U-RS.
 Figure S3. Alternative Adjustments for Family Size

100
Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

90

80

70

60
Baseline
Divide by Nr of Adults
50 Divide by Family Size

1940 1950 1960 1970 1980

Child's Birth Cohort

Notes: This figure plots absolute mobility by cohort, replicating Figure 3D using alternative adjustments for family size. We
divide the baseline family income measures for both parents and children by either the total number of adults in the household
(triangles) or by family size (open circles). The number of adults is defined as one plus an indicator for being married. In the
CPS, family size is defined as the number of own children plus the number of spouses. In the Census, family size is defined as
the number of own family members residing with each individual.
 Figure S4. Effects of Increasing Child Income on Absolute Mobility for 1984 Cohort
Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

100

90

80

70

60

50
0 10,000 20,000 30,000 40,000 50,000
Magnitude of Income Increase for Children in 2010

Notes: This figure recalculates absolute mobility for the 1984 birth after increasing each childs income in 2010 by fixed dollar
amounts ranging from 0 to $50,000 (measured in real 2014 dollars). Aside from these increments to childrens incomes, all other
aspects of the specification are identical to the baseline.
 Figure S5. Alternative Measures of Absolute Mobility

A. Alternative Income Thresholds

Pct. of Children Earning 20% More/Less than Parents

100 Baseline
20% Less
90 20% More

80

70

60

50

40
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980
Child's Birth Cohort

B. Median Ratio of Childrens Income to Parents Income

Median Child Income / Parent Income

2.5

1.5

1940 1950 1960 1970 1980

Child's Birth Cohort

Notes: This figure shows estimates of absolute mobility by birth cohort using alternative measures of mobility. Panel A shows the
fraction of children earning 20% more than their parents or 20% less than their parents. Panel B plots the median ratio of child to
parent income. All other aspects of the absolute mobility calculations are identical to those used in the baseline specification.
 Figure S6. Alternative Income Definitions

Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

100 Baseline
Wage Income Only
90 Family Income

80

70

60

50

1940 1950 1960 1970 1980

Child's Birth Cohort

Notes: This figure plots absolute mobility by cohort, replicating Figure 1B using alternative income definitions for parents and
children. Wage Income is computed as the sum of wage and salary income of the individual and spouse (if applicable). Family
income is total income from all co-residing members of the primary family. The Supplemental Appendix provides further details
on how these measures are defined. Aside from these changes to the income definition, all other aspects of the specification are
identical to the baseline.
 Figure S7. Effect of Including Immigrants

Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

100 Baseline
Including Immigrants

90

80

70

60

50

1940 1950 1960 1970 1980

Child's Birth Cohort

Notes: This figure plots absolute mobility by cohort, replicating Figure 1B including immigrants in the sample of children. The
CPS-ASEC did not collect data on birthplace prior to 1994, so the 1964 cohort is the first cohort for which immigrants are
excluded from our baseline sample.
 Figure S8. Sensitivity to Parent Age at Child Birth

Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

100 Baseline
Parents Who Have Children
Between Ages 25-35 Only
90

80

70

60

50

1940 1950 1960 1970 1980

Child's Birth Cohort

Notes: This figure replicates Figure 1B after restricting the sample to parents who have a child between ages 25-35, the ages at
which we measure parents incomes. All other aspects of the specification are identical to the baseline. The baseline estimates
include all parents who have a child between ages 16-45 by pooling data across multiple Censuses.
 Figure S9. Alternative Data Sources for Marginal Income Distributions

Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

100 Baseline
CPS Only
90 Census Only

80

70

60

50

40
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980
Child's Birth Cohort

Notes: This figure plots absolute mobility by cohort, measuring both parents and childrens incomes using the same dataset
rather than using annual CPS data for children and decadal Census data for parents as in our baseline specification. In the Census
only series, parents incomes are identical to the baseline, while childrens income distributions are defined using total family
income among all 30-year olds. In the CPS only series, childrens incomes are identical to the baseline, while parents income
distributions are calculated using total family income for parents of newborns in families where the higher-earning parent is aged
25-35. The CPS only series therefore excludes parents who have children after age 35 or before age 25, as in Figure S8. The CPS
only series begins in 1968 because consistent income definitions for parents are not readily available in prior years. All other
aspects of the specifications in both series are identical to the baseline.
 Figure S10. Heterogeneity by Gender

100 Baseline
Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

Son vs. Parents' Family Income

90 Daughter vs. Parents' Family Income
Son vs. Father Individual Income
80 Daughter vs. Father Individual Income

70

60

50

40

30

20
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980
Child's Birth Cohort

Notes: This figure plots absolute mobility by cohort for sons and daughters using individual income and family income
(including spousal income). The series in solid triangles plots the fraction of sons whose family income exceeds their parents
family income, replicating Figure 1B for sons. Similarly, the series in hollow triangles plots the fraction of daughters whose
family income exceeds their parents family income. The series in circles plots the fraction of sons whose individual income
exceeds their fathers individual income, replicating the series in Figure 3D. The series in squares plots the fraction of daughters
whose individual income exceeds their fathers individual income.
 Figure S11. Median Incomes by Year, Individuals Aged 25-34

50000

40000
Income (Real 2014$)

30000

20000
Our Sample - Males
CPS Historical Income Tables - Males
Our Sample - Females
CPS Historical Income Tables - Females
10000
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Year

Notes: This figure plots the median income of individuals aged 25-34 in the CPS as published by the Census Bureau (Historical
Income Tables: People P-8) alongside our own estimates, constructed from the CPS-ASEC. Both series use total personal
(individual) income, adjusting for inflation using CPI-U-RS. In contrast to our baseline marginal income distributions, we pool
individuals from ages 25-34 and drop individuals with zero income for comparability with the published Census tables.
 Figure S12. Alternative Counterfactuals

A. Baseline Specification, Age 40 B. Shares of GDP Growth, Age 30

100 100 Mean AM:91.5%
Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

Mean AM:85.8% 1940 Empirical

1940 Empirical
80
80 Mean AM:73.6% Mean AM:79.7%

Mean AM:67.5% 60
60
Mean AM:50.0%

Mean AM:55.8% 40 Mean AM:46.5%

40
1980 Empirical

20
1970 Empirical

20 1970 GDP/family growth rate (1.5%), 1940 income shares 1980 GDP/family growth rate (1.5%), 1940 income growth shares
1940 GDP/family growth rate (2.5%), 1970 income shares 1940 GDP/family growth rate (2.5%), 1980 income growth shares
0
0 20 40 60 80 100 0 20 40 60 80 100
Parent Income Percentile (conditional on positive income) Parent Income Percentile (conditional on positive income)

C. Shares of GDP Growth, Age 40

100
Pct. of Children Earning more than their Parents

Mean AM:85.8%

1940 Empirical

80
Mean AM:74.4%

Mean AM:57.1%
60

Mean AM:55.8%

40

1970 Empirical

20

1970 GDP/family growth rate (1.5%), 1940 income growth shares

1940 GDP/family growth rate (2.5%), 1970 income growth shares
0
0 20 40 60 80 100
Parent Income Percentile (conditional on positive income)

Notes: This figure presents the alternative counterfactual scenarios described in Section III of the Supplemental Appendix. Panel A replicates the
counterfactuals in Figure 5A, measuring incomes at age 40 instead of age 30. We use the 1970 cohort instead of the 1980 cohort for the age 40 analyses
as it is the most recent decadal cohort for which income at age 40 can be observed. Panel B reports results from GDP growth shares counterfactuals, in
which counterfactual incomes for children in the 1980 cohort are constructed based on observed shares of GDP growth from birth to age 30 (1980-
2010) rather than shares of GDP levels in 2010. Panel C replicates Panel B, measuring incomes at age 40 instead of age 30. In all panels, the dotted
lines present the higher GDP growth counterfactuals, while the dashed lines present the more equal growth counterfactuals.
 Table S1. Summary Statistics for Child and Parent Samples

Children (CPS) Parents (Census)

Child's
No. of Weighted Income at Age 30 ($) No. of Income Ages 25-35 ($)
Birth
Children Count Mean Median Families Mean Median
Cohort
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)
1940 1,614 2,256,476 57,159 53,512 9,990 18,835 17,836
1941 1,680 2,371,403 55,473 53,259 20,186 20,642 18,694
1942 1,745 2,652,364 56,587 53,708 21,106 21,280 19,322
1943 1,899 2,903,434 59,352 55,689 22,847 22,295 19,857
1944 1,843 2,901,957 62,069 57,792 23,252 22,651 19,857
1945 1,718 2,809,649 56,839 55,440 23,203 23,723 19,857
1946 1,706 2,718,989 56,448 52,430 23,562 24,614 20,065
1947 2,687 3,606,320 58,853 55,311 30,276 27,836 23,781
1948 2,560 3,583,373 58,909 54,886 31,256 29,448 25,961
1949 2,500 3,566,347 58,642 55,645 29,699 31,124 27,383
1950 2,990 3,590,742 59,857 55,605 28,767 32,968 29,517
1951 2,953 3,674,309 57,163 54,729 20,952 32,051 28,259
1952 2,703 3,860,927 54,891 51,845 22,888 34,244 30,867
1953 2,730 3,970,066 53,765 49,012 24,561 35,363 32,606
1954 2,650 3,901,364 52,739 48,136 26,423 36,536 34,345
1955 2,817 4,153,580 55,118 50,759 28,574 37,610 35,562
1956 2,827 4,373,260 56,333 49,882 29,868 39,065 35,918
1957 2,805 4,432,183 59,033 51,644 31,813 39,776 36,629
1958 2,825 4,517,124 58,266 52,226 33,631 41,304 38,052
1959 2,528 4,412,732 58,809 51,170 34,691 42,177 38,407
1960 2,680 4,481,928 56,694 49,976 35,564 43,920 40,185
1961 2,726 4,510,418 55,700 47,638 36,524 44,595 40,263
1962 2,757 4,602,943 54,836 46,972 36,866 46,175 42,319
1963 2,713 4,610,697 55,496 47,538 36,868 46,904 43,030
1964 2,025 3,730,913 57,175 45,674 37,765 47,545 43,566
1965 1,953 3,644,244 58,793 50,614 36,470 48,320 44,809
1966 1,561 3,357,382 59,394 49,377 34,243 49,116 45,520
1967 1,580 3,396,908 58,872 49,600 33,126 50,358 46,259
1968 1,552 3,292,186 65,263 53,759 32,301 51,129 46,942
1969 1,577 3,281,357 63,261 52,431 33,312 51,675 47,972
1970 1,447 3,089,620 69,381 56,853 33,917 53,437 49,282
1971 2,599 3,422,277 71,011 55,037 36,921 52,504 48,258
1972 2,393 3,191,262 68,175 53,934 33,459 52,714 48,659
1973 2,140 2,910,392 67,448 54,105 32,359 52,928 48,829
1974 2,179 3,031,181 68,171 52,155 30,718 53,864 49,787
1975 2,040 2,825,818 65,862 52,659 31,351 54,185 50,257
1976 2,009 3,017,329 62,741 49,029 31,286 54,770 51,060
1977 2,085 3,062,028 69,692 52,857 31,426 55,238 51,699
1978 2,041 3,092,305 66,815 51,513 32,222 55,956 51,699
1979 2,132 3,175,792 64,679 49,814 32,488 55,333 51,685
1980 2,153 3,153,461 60,650 46,373 34,928 57,028 52,930
1981 2,242 3,328,443 58,088 43,448 35,819 52,548 46,204
1982 2,086 3,225,419 60,189 47,384 34,326 53,202 46,841
1983 2,156 3,381,167 57,644 43,350 35,916 53,542 47,062
1984 2,005 3,212,377 53,435 42,687 35,375 54,586 47,947
Notes: The table presents summary statistics for the samples used to estimate parents' and children's
marginal income distributions in our baseline analysis. Columns 1-4 report statistics for children from the
CPS, while columns 5-7 report statistics for parents from the Census. Column 1 reports the total number of
children observed at age 30 in each birth cohort in the CPS; for example, the 1940 cohort is observed at
age 30 in the 1970 CPS. Column 2 reports the sum of the sampling weights for each birth cohort in the
CPS, i.e. the weighted cohort size. Columns 3 and 4 report the mean and median incomes of these
children at age 30 using our baseline family income measure, which sums income across spouses.
Column 5 presents the number of families who have children in each birth cohort, drawing on data from
multiple Census years as described in the text. Columns 6 and 7 present the mean and median family
incomes of these parents. Incomes are expressed in 2014 dollars, adjusting for inflation using the CPI-U-
RS.
 Table S2. Absolute Mobility by State and Birth Cohort

Absolute Mobility Rate by Birth Cohort (%) Change from

State 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1940-80
Alabama 92.0 81.8 64.5 63.9 51.9 40.1
Alaska 87.3 57.2 45.0 37.9 49.4
Arizona 88.5 73.9 57.7 57.5 46.2 42.3
Arkansas 92.1 83.3 70.7 66.0 56.0 36.1
California 89.1 71.2 58.0 57.2 48.8 40.3
Colorado 92.0 77.5 54.9 62.8 49.9 42.1
Connecticut 92.3 79.0 66.8 64.1 51.8 40.5
Delaware 91.6 81.9 70.8 51.4 40.2
District of Columbia 86.3 77.4 71.7 68.9 66.2 20.1
Florida 90.5 77.2 62.3 61.4 45.8 44.7
Georgia 92.1 82.6 63.0 59.5 48.2 43.9
Hawaii 94.4 59.7 54.6 50.0 44.4
Idaho 94.6 81.2 68.4 49.2 45.3
Illinois 92.4 78.2 59.5 58.3 47.0 45.5
Indiana 94.3 79.0 59.7 58.6 48.4 45.9
Iowa 94.8 82.9 65.7 65.7 54.0 40.8
Kansas 93.6 82.1 66.4 63.1 49.7 43.9
Kentucky 91.9 83.3 64.5 70.1 53.4 38.5
Louisiana 88.7 80.1 58.6 59.5 53.2 35.5
Maine 93.2 77.5 74.3 66.8 50.1 43.1
Maryland 90.8 75.3 59.8 59.6 51.2 39.5
Massachusetts 91.4 77.9 67.9 67.5 55.4 36.0
Michigan 93.3 76.8 57.1 58.5 45.7 47.6
Minnesota 94.3 84.1 64.4 63.2 52.9 41.4
Mississippi 90.7 82.8 66.0 66.4 53.1 37.6
Missouri 93.8 80.8 63.0 61.8 52.4 41.4
Montana 91.5 80.1 64.9 58.6 33.0
Nebraska 94.5 83.3 65.4 66.9 54.9 39.6
Nevada 89.1 69.5 51.9 49.2 39.5 49.7
New Hampshire 93.0 78.5 62.8 61.5 51.0 42.1
New Jersey 89.9 77.3 66.7 64.4 52.5 37.4
New Mexico 89.5 80.1 57.3 60.6 50.9 38.7
New York 90.0 77.6 65.8 64.2 54.7 35.3
North Carolina 92.8 83.5 69.0 65.0 49.8 43.0
North Dakota 93.7 84.2 73.6 59.4 34.3
Ohio 93.0 78.0 58.1 58.0 47.9 45.2
Oklahoma 93.8 81.7 64.9 57.1 51.2 42.5
Oregon 92.0 76.5 55.4 60.2 47.7 44.3
Pennsylvania 92.6 81.5 65.9 65.0 53.9 38.7
Rhode Island 90.8 80.1 70.5 66.8 54.4 36.4
South Carolina 91.1 82.8 67.4 63.3 49.4 41.7
South Dakota 92.9 81.3 76.0 62.3 30.6
Tennessee 92.3 81.5 62.2 64.6 49.6 42.7
Texas 91.3 80.5 61.3 58.8 50.5 40.7
Utah 93.7 78.3 64.3 61.1 53.1 40.6
Vermont 91.8 81.5 73.8 47.4 44.4
Virginia 90.6 82.1 65.3 59.9 47.9 42.7
Washington 91.9 76.7 59.4 57.5 45.8 46.1
West Virginia 93.0 82.4 66.2 58.3 49.9 43.1
Wisconsin 94.4 81.0 62.9 63.7 50.6 43.8
Wyoming 91.4 75.1 62.8 49.0 42.4
Notes: This table presents rates of absolute mobility by state for decadal cohorts from 1940-80; the final column shows the
magnitude of the change from 1940 to 1980. Since childrens state of birth is not observed in the CPS, we use the Census for
both parents and children. To increase precision, we include all children aged 25-35 and use the 100% Census in 1940 and 5%
IPUMS sample in 1980. Measuring childrens incomes from ages 25-35 rather than just at age 30 creates small differences in
levels of absolute mobility. To adjust for these differences, we calculate the difference between the baseline national estimates
and population-weighted national means of our state-level estimates for each cohort, and add these differences to the state-
level estimates. State-cohort cells with insufficient data are blank.
 Table S3. Income Variables Used to Measure Parents' Incomes, by Census Year
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
INCWAGE FTOTINC INCWAGE INCWAGE INCWAGE INCWAGE INCWAGE
INCNONWG INCBUSFM INCBUS INCBUS INCBUS INCBUS
INCOTHER INCFARM INCFARM INCFARM INCSS
INCSS INCSS INCSS INCINVST
INCOTHER INCINVST INCINVST INCRETIR
INCOTHER INCRETIR INCOTHER
INCOTHER
Notes: This table lists the income variables in the IPUMS-USA that are used to construct the baseline
measures of parental family income by Census year.
 Table S4. Income Variables Used to Measure Children's Incomes, by CPS Year
1970-1975 1976-1987 1988-2014
INCWAGE INCWAGE INCWAGE
INCBUS INCBUS INCBUS
INCFARM INCFARM INCFARM
INCSS INCSS INCSS
INCGOV INCGOV INCRETIR
INCIDR INCRETIR INCINT
INCALOTH INCDRT INCUNEMP
INCINT INCWKCOM
INCALOTH INCVET
INCSURV
INCDISAB
INCDIVID
INCRENT
INCEDUC
INCCHILD
INCALIM
INCASIST
INCOTHER
Notes: This table lists the income variables in the IPUMS-CPS that are used to construct the baseline
measures of children's family income by CPS year.